Now that Samsung has jumped into the crowded AI-powered glasses arena alongside Apple, Google, Meta, and others, CISOs and IT leaders are again having to think through whether it makes sense to establish enterprise restrictions on such devices, given the likely data leakage and privacy and compliance issues.
And even if those tech leaders decide that such policies might make sense, the logistical hurdles to universally enforcing them outside the office are all but insurmountable.
For example, it is up to individual wearers to choose their device’s settings, making it difficult for IT policies around data acquisition and usage to be enforced. Worse, AI devices have a history of ignoring guardrails. That means that a setting that limits how data is used may not necessarily be obeyed.
One possible mitigating factor is that smart glasses typically have a light on the frame that activates when the device is recording, but there are also many easy ways for workers to defeat or cover up those lights to conceal their activities.
Enforcement is virtually impossible
However, said independent technology analyst Carmi Levy, “although some organizations have tried to physically ban smart glasses from their in-person and virtual workplaces, the sad reality for corporate technological gatekeepers is there is no way to completely keep any device out of the workplace.”
There is nothing stopping employees from wearing eyewear of any type, smart or not, he noted, “and attempting to do so might put employers on the wrong side of a disability lawsuit launched by a worker who needs prescription smart glasses to accommodate vision issues.”
As well, Jitesh Ubrani, an IDC director focusing on worldwide device trackers, pointed out that the biggest challenge in creating rules around usage of smart glasses is that the data leakage problem with devices is both not new and certainly not limited to glasses.
“The instinct to ban AI smart glasses outright is understandable, but it misses that the underlying risk isn’t new. A smartphone has been able to record a whiteboard, a screen, or a conversation for close to two decades,” he said. “What’s changed is the friction. Glasses make covert capture nearly effortless and far harder to notice because there’s no phone being visibly raised or pointed. That’s a real escalation in ease of misuse, but it’s a difference of degree rather than a fundamentally new capability.”
In fact, Ubrani argued, “where this gets hard for CISOs is enforcement. A ban on paper is easy to write. Enforcing it inside a corporate office is already difficult, since most current-generation devices, including Meta’s Ray-Bans, are visually indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear.”
And, he added, “enforcing it in a hybrid or work-from-home setting is close to impossible. IT has no practical way to confirm what someone is wearing on a home Zoom call, and even in-office detection options, like scanning for Bluetooth or BLE advertising signals tied to known manufacturer IDs, only catch devices that haven’t been reconfigured or that happen to be broadcasting at the time.”
Additional risk
Connected glasses have a history going back decades, but enterprises didn’t take them seriously until this year.
But Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, characterized the problem as more psychological than technological.
“People want to ban it because they don’t know how to handle it. But that just creates more problems than it solves. It’s a very kneejerk fear reaction,” Sag said. “We live in an era where cameras are everywhere.”
Meghan Hollis, a senior principal analyst for Gartner, agreed that the focus on smart glasses is misplaced, given that even headphones can today capture audio for translation and transcription. The change is not in the data capture, Hollis said, but the fact that it is adding video.
This creates additional risk, with the new capability brought into the corporate environment causing “a potential exposure for corporate intellectual property,” Hollis said.
One other often-overlooked issue is data sovereignty. Even if the glasses manufacturer agrees to store data only in specific countries, it could easily change that policy or simply switch third-party vendors.
“There could be export control issues, possibly violating regulatory controls in transmitting information,” Hollis noted.
However, Hollis said, threatening to punish workers if they are caught using unauthorized devices “is your last line of defense,” and that the best initial approach should not be enforcement, but education.
“You need to be educating your end-users, with constant reinforcement, telling them, ‘If you do this, here’s how you can harm the company and our clients/customers.’ Combine that with, ‘And if you do this, we will take action against you.’”
Tiered policies required
Hollis noted that the risk goes beyond an employee initially recording something they shouldn’t. Consider, for example, a technical meeting where an employee asks the rest of the attendees for permission to record the discussion. They agree and he starts to record.
At the end of the meeting, he leaves to return to his office, fully intending to turn off the recording function when he gets there. But on the way, he has a brief hallway meeting with an SVP who tells him, without warning, “FYI, but the board just decided to greenlight our hostile takeover of Smith Corp. We’ll explore the specifics at a 10 a.m. tomorrow. Have your team there.” The executive then walks off.
With the recording still running, that ultra-sensitive data has just been transmitted to the cloud.
IDC’s Ubrani pointed out that situations like this make smart glasses governance more challenging. “Enterprise IT and security leaders need to stop framing this as ‘ban versus allow,’ and instead build a tiered policy based on where the actual risk sits,” he said. “Boardrooms, R&D labs, and any space where trade secrets or regulated data are visible or discussed out loud deserve strict no-wearables rules, enforced the same way phone bans already are in those rooms.”
Open floor plans and general office space probably don’t need that level of restriction, he said, but meeting policies should require disclosure when a device capable of recording is present, similar to the way in which some companies already handle personal recording devices in sensitive briefings.
“Companies that try to write one blanket rule for every environment are going to find it’s either unenforceable or so restrictive it interferes with accessibility, since some employees rely on these devices as assistive technology,” he said.
However, Brian Jackson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, argued that enterprise CISOs and IT Directors need to take a far more strict position.
“Organizations should update their acceptable use policies for personal technology ASAP,” he said. “Look back about 15 years ago at how smartphones moved from consumer life into the workplace, and we may be at the beginning of a redefinition of BYOD here. But it needs to start with an extremely restrictive policy against the use of AI wearables and similar devices.”
He added, “organizations need to hold the line against making personal recordings in the workplace and maintain not only their compliance standards, but their workplace culture. This restriction cannot go as far as an outright ban; look at how Walt Disney World got caught up in a lawsuit after telling an employee she could not use Meta glasses. Still, this exception can be made narrow, and it should be made clear that other employees must be alerted when they are being recorded.”
This article originally appeared on CSOonline.
Login
